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Brené Brown would like a word with Silicon Valley
BetterUp The author and researcher has no patience for tech's bad-boss era. BetterUp By Aki Ito You're currently following this author! Want to unfollow? Unsubscribe via the link in your email. 2026-04-26T08:17:01.287Z Not so long ago, Brené Brown's ideas about vulnerability as a leadership virtue were not only uncontroversial, they were embraced in corporate America. No longer.Today, CEOs are conducting sweeping layoffs, dressing them up as productivity gains. They're ratcheting up the pressure on their remaining teams, cracking down on dissent, tracking their workers' every keystroke, and pouring billions into the all-consuming infrastructure of AI projects while scaling back their investment in employees. This is the new reality, they say. If you don't like it, get out."If you are an asshole leader," Brown told me, "you have never had more cover than you have right now to continue that behavior, because of the strong-man authoritarianism we're seeing." The author and researcher said she had "the behavior of a lot of tech leaders right now" in mind."Courageous leaders do not change who they are based on the political climate," she said. "They don't look to see, 'Oh, empathy's not in style today, I think I'll have less of that.'""Does that bring a level of scrutiny to leaders when the president of the United States — or the president of whatever country they're operating from — predominantly has a different perspective? Yeah, it does. It really does. But zero excuses."If you are an asshole leader, you have never had more cover than you have right now.Brown met me this month in a hotel in San Francisco, on the sidelines of a conference hosted by the coaching platform BetterUp. It's been 16 years since she gave a viral TED talk on her research on shame and vulnerability that's probably made more people cry than anything else on the internet (it now has nearly 100 million views). In person, she was exactly as she was in the TED talk: warm and disarming, rarely breaking eye contact, and quick to offer self-deprecating quips that kept me laughing through the interview. Since catapulting to fame, Brown has taken her research and applied it to the workplace, creating a leadership curriculum that was acquired by BetterUp. Today, as executive chair of the Center for Daring Leadership, she's embedded inside organizations such as power management giant Eaton and enterprise network provider Lumen Technologies.I asked Brown what she's hearing right now from the...
Brené Brown - Facebook
Brené Brown. 4,032,012 likes · 6,983 talking about this. I'm a research professor at The University of Houston studying courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy.
Silicon Valley Calls It Taste. I Call It Something Else
Taste Is Acquirable Silicon Valley decided taste was the moat. Steve Jobs had it. Jony Ive had it. Now every founder wants to signal it and every CMO is trying to hire for it. I've spent thirty years in rooms with people who actually have it. Dapper Dan, who rebuilt luxury from the outside before luxury knew it needed him.
Founding Fathers of Silicon Valley
It's hundreds of firms like this, large and small, that make Silicon Valley what it is. But the Valley is not just a geographical agglomeration of companies spawned by Stanford's presence and endless spin-offs.
